


Like a Broken Watch

by torolulu



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Immortality, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-07
Updated: 2012-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-29 03:59:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/torolulu/pseuds/torolulu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sylar's future now stretches out to eternity, but the only thing he looks forward to is the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Broken Watch

Sylar has heard it suggested that in five billion years the sun will expand enough to envelope the first four planets in the solar system. His body and brain would burn with the earth and hopefully his consciousness would not continue, dispersed among the fusion reactors of a giant red star.

That makes five billion years that he might live – not counting the ones that he might live again. That is approximately one trillion, eight hundred and twenty-five billion days.

Mohinder is eighty-six years old when he dies. Eighty-six years, five months, and one week.

There exist precisely thirty-one thousand, five-hundred and seventy-three days on which he is alive.

They’re what Sylar has to work with.

 

*

 

Sylar expects his first visit to Mohinder to be the beginning of a grand seduction.

He’ll arrive at a time in Mohinder’s life when his own presence had diminished back down to dreams. The passage of time still means something to Mohinder, providing a distance from which his deeds can be viewed dispassionately and allowing feelings of disgust and hatred to be replaced with grief and longing.

And Sylar will appear, like his angelic namesake, to reintroduce purpose and sublimity into Mohinder’s existence.

 

*

 

Mohinder is thirty-three years old when he meets Sylar. Thirty-three years, six months, and eighteen days.

There are precisely twelve thousand, two hundred and fifty-five days on which Mohinder never knew him.

Sylar resents their existence. He wants to obliterate them. But he recognizes their potential necessity in facilitating their crossing of paths, and he can’t sacrifice that – it cuts his time with Mohinder nearly in half, but Mohinder never really becomes _his_ Mohinder until he shoots a bullet between Sylar’s eyes, and Sylar can’t chance a universe in which he never gets to see his expression before he pulls the trigger.

He can observe, though, in inconspicuous guises, learning everything he can about Mohinder that might hasten his seduction, building up knowledge like ammunition against the forces that still bind Mohinder and encroach upon their precious time together.

 

*

 

Sylar waits for Mohinder in the living room of his apartment, having finally decided to make his presence known.

Keys jingle and the door opens. Mohinder walks into the room without the flinch and gasp that Sylar is expecting – without even a glance in his direction.

“Sylar,” Mohinder says curtly, walking straight past him and into the bedroom. He turns to face the doorway. “Are you coming?”

Sylar hesitates, speechless, until Mohinder starts to unbutton his shirt.

“What are you doing?”

Mohinder’s shirt slides off his shoulders and he looks up at from beneath downcast lashes. “What do you think?” he says, and it’s scornful and bored and accompanied by a mirthless laugh, but it doesn’t matter because he’s looking _straight_ at Sylar as he says it.

Sylar has endured centuries of loneliness – of clandestine visits rationed out between decades, observation from afar, looking without touching – but after that simple bit of eye contact, the idea of living one more second without his hands on Mohinder’s skin is unthinkable.

He joins Mohinder in the bedroom, grabbing his face and kissing him so hard that their teeth clack together sharply, cutting their lips. Their blood mingles, healing both of their wounds, and they kiss again with fresh skin.

Mohinder accepts the pain without protest, accepts Sylar’s tongue pushing into his mouth and his fingers fumbling clumsily with his belt, so eager that his steady hands are shaking for the first time in his life.

Sylar shoves Mohinder down on the bed. He crawls on top of him, groping and grasping with hands and teeth at every random square inch of skin within his reach and grinding his hips down mindlessly.

Mohinder’s hands reach toward the fly of Sylar’s jeans, but Sylar forces them flat against the bed with his mind. He doesn’t want to break contact for the amount of time that removing his clothes would take. He expects a struggle, but Mohinder just moans and tells him “yes”.

Somewhere in the back of Sylar’s mind sits the knowledge that actions he’s yet to carry out are what brought this moment into existence, but his curiosity about Mohinder’s past and his own future is trumped by the willing body present beneath him.

 

*

 

If Sylar were to space out these encounters evenly throughout the rest of his projected existence, taking for himself a day each time, he would see Mohinder roughly once every two hundred sixty thousand years. It’s unacceptable. Even Sylar, with his perception that can peer into the inner workings of the universe and watch the wheels turn, can’t conceive of such a length of time. And Mohinder deserves better than the desperate heap of bones into which such a drought would wither him.

So he haggles with himself, negotiates between his reason and desire until a mutually satisfactory schedule can be reached.

He settles on one day a year, for now. Something to look forward to like his own personal Christmas.

 

*

 

Mohinder’s skin ripples into a shiver of goosebumps as Sylar breathes ice into his ear.

“I thought you lost that one,” he says. “When you had the Shanti virus.”

“I find it again. Three years down the road, in Long Island.” Sylar’s cold hands slide up Mohinder’s rib cage, quickly increasing to an unnaturally warm temperature.

“I don’t suppose you found that one in Long Island, as well?”

 

*

 

Occasionally Sylar’s visits conflict with Mohinder’s schedule. He’ll claim to have plans—sometimes work related, sometimes dinner with a friend—and Sylar’s furious insistence that his patience gives him precedence over Mohinder’s other commitments will relent at the exhaustion in Mohinder’s eyes.

Sometimes Sylar looks at the people Mohinder interacts with day-to-day and wonders if he got greedy – did he use up all the days that he had with Mohinder and decide to return again and again as his friends and waiters and laboratory assistants?

Did he pick everyone else off until he became literally the only person in his world, infiltrating every aspect of his life and finally making his domination of him absolute?

He wonders, does Mohinder ever think about that?

 

*

 

Sylar never thought he’d prefer the old Brooklyn apartment to the house Mohinder later moved to in Chennai, but he’d never been there on the hottest day in June when the air conditioner was in repair.

They lie together nude on top of the covers, near as they can get to the open window, but there’s no breeze to cool the sweat that’s slickening Mohinder’s skin under Sylar’s lazy fingertips and sliding down to dampen the sheet beneath them until it sticks to their thighs whenever they move.

“Why don’t you use your power on me?” Mohinder asks.

Sylar smirks and Mohinder is pushed flat on his back, his arms shooting up above his head by their own accord.

“I didn’t mean that one.” Mohinder arches his back as Sylar runs his palm down his chest. “Cryokinesis. Cool me down.”

“I lost it,” Sylar says, “when I had the Shanti virus.”

 

*

 

Sylar can tell by the startled jump and widening of Mohinder’s eyes when he enters his apartment that this is their first time together, but a year’s worth of pent up desire compels him to kiss him all the same.

Mohinder bites his bottom lip _hard_ , grinding his teeth with startling ferocity until the pain is too much for Sylar and he pulls away. Blood streams down his chin and dribbles onto his shirtfront until his healing kicks in to stem the flow.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Mohinder shouts.

“Soon you won’t be able to get enough of it.”

“How could you possibly think…?” Mohinder’s indignation is cut off by a knock on his door. Sylar gestures for him to answer it.

Mohinder opens his door to see Sylar is standing in the hall. He turns around. The Sylar who was behind him blinks out of existence.

“You have time travel now?”

“I have a lot of powers now.” Sylar steps forward, closing the door behind him, and places his right hand on Mohinder’s arm while his left reaches to touch his hair.

Mohinder begins to speak but falters, his expression turning inward.

“Like what?” he says when his eyes regain focus. He isn’t fighting anymore—he’s leaning into Sylar’s touch, practically encouraging him.

Sylar tries to answer and finds himself coming up short. There aren’t enough, certainly not to account for the decades immediately following his stint as Nathan Petrelli that he knows he spent hunting. He searches his memories of the time period and recalls only empty houses and frustration.

He sees the wheels turning in Mohinder’s head and in his own the pieces snap into place. So this is what his grand seduction boils down to.

Sylar kisses Mohinder again, meeting no resistance, already feeling nostalgia at the taste of dried blood on their lips for what he now recognizes as the only honest kiss that Mohinder will ever give him. He guides Mohinder into the bedroom for their respective last and first times together.

 

*

 

“Hiro Nakamura.”

Hiro starts, and then turns to greet the man behind him.

“Future Me!”

“Hello, Hiro,” the man says in English, no trace of the accent that still lingers slightly in Hiro’s speech.

“What are you doing here?” Hiro asks. “We stopped the bomb.”

“There’s no time,” his future self answers. “Teleport out of here, as far away as you can.”

“But…”

“Now!”

Hiro flinches and then disappears.

A thin line of blood appears on his future self’s forehead and he falls to the ground before he can join his predecessor.

 

*

 

Sylar wakes to memories of intense pain and something verging on sympathy for his countless victims. His skull has finished knitting itself back together, but he remains in the form into which he had shifted to accomplish his task. He shifts back, feeling his flesh expand in places to accommodate his lengthening bones and shrink in others to cling tighter to his muscles until he is himself once more.

He still remembers every single day with Mohinder.

He tests out each of his powers, one by one, to verify that his recently desecrated brain has returned to its previous state of perfection.

They work flawlessly – every last one.

Sylar runs his finger idly through a cloud of kicked-up dust suspended in the air. Time starts again and the dust swirls down to the ground, patterns dissolving like they were never there.

Maybe, Sylar thinks, he's destined to see Mohinder one last time.

Maybe, when he's ready, he’ll visit Mohinder in the early morning of his thirty-one thousand, five hundred and seventy-third day and together they’ll go watch the world end.


End file.
